The primary objective of a telephony connection is to communicate information. The information may be a simple “Hello” or may be more detailed information. For example, when a user calls a customer service call center, the user may be asked to provide various pieces of information in order to authenticate their identity with the customer service call center. Examples of such information may include name, security code, account number, date of birth, etc.
One problem with traditional telephony connections, especially in the context of customer service call centers, is that oftentimes when a call is transferred from one agent to the next, the caller needs to provide the authenticating information again to the next agent. This process is inefficient and can be become annoying to the caller when the caller must repeatedly provide the authenticating information.
Another problem with traditional telephony connections, also in the context of customer service call centers, is that users are often placed on hold for long periods of time. The user typically does not know how many other users are in front of the user in the queue and does not know the approximate wait time. This unknown adds to the frustration of being placed on hold. Some customer service call centers provide an automated message that informs the user of his or her position in the queue and the approximate wait time. Although this bit of information may mitigate the frustration and irritation of being placed on hold, it does not solve the problem of waiting in a queue to achieve the ultimate goal of the call.
To overcome some of these drawbacks, the customer service call center may provide a “call back” feature where the user provides a phone number to the customer service call center and then hangs up. The user's position in the queue is tracked and the customer service call center places an outgoing call to the user when the user's position in the queue comes up. However, the call back feature is wrought with security concerns. It is relatively simple for a malicious party to spoof the phone number of the customer service call center and call the user representing itself as the customer service call center. The malicious party could then obtain sensitive information from the user for illegal purposes, e.g., to steal the user's money. For this reason, users prefer to place outgoing calls to trusted phone numbers rather than accepting or trusting incoming calls from potentially malicious parties.
Thus, such conventional systems are subject to failure making them unreliable and undesirable. Accordingly, there remains a need in the art for a method and apparatus for a secure and efficient way to share information over a phone call connection.